Beaufort County Council committee recommends restoring school district's 2014 revenue shortfall for next year

If Beaufort County Council follows its finance committee’s latest recommendation, the Beaufort County School District will have its funding level from last year restored, but may still have to make cuts to its proposed budget.

The six-member committee voted unanimously Monday to fund the district through tax collections at the same level next fiscal year — $114.8 million — as it originally approved for this year, which would compensate for inaccurate projections that left the district with a roughly $4 million revenue shortfall.

District officials have estimated restoring the levels next year would require at least a 4.1-mill increase. Superintendent Jeff Moss has said he views that increase more as the fulfillment of a promise rather than a blatant tax increase.

The district is requesting an overall 7.2-mill hike — which would send the district’s tax collections north of $118 million — to help compensate for the shortfall and pay for its proposed $192.9 million budget. The spending plan would be about $10 million higher than this year’s budget — a spike Moss and other district officials have attributed to an increase in unfunded state mandates and growing enrollment.

Last week, several council members expressed hesitance at granting the district the full millage hike and asked Moss to consider where cuts could be made if council decided to approve only part of the increase.

“A lot of us have a consensus that we’re not going to agree to that full amount,” councilman Brian Flewelling told Moss, “but we’d like to see where you would go with the number we come up with and how funding you at a lower level will affect your programs and services.”

Moss said last week that while he wasn’t certain, if a lower spending figure is approved, the district would likely have to hold off on the expansion of some programs, such as pre-kindergarten, and forgo the implementation of some new software and technology initiatives, among other things.

On Monday, Moss reiterated that he would prefer council to give a figure it would prefer before he could choose between options to present to the board of education.

“I’m concerned with playing what-if games without knowing the dollar values,” said Moss, adding that simply restoring last year’s revenue shortfall and not offsetting the added expenses in the budget would cause the district to continue to dig into its reserve fund, unless it cut enough services from the proposed budget.

“There’s no way the system could continue to dip into the fund balance at between $2-4 million every year and survive,” Moss said.

Council, which unanimously passed first reading of the district’s proposed budget May 27, will have a second of three readings at 4 p.m. Monday in council chambers in Beaufort, with the committee’s recommendation factored in.

Councilwoman Laura Von Harten said she’d like to see a budget passed where the school district doesn’t have to continue tapping into its reserve fund. Much like the county itself, she said, the district needs to have a strong reserve maintained in the event of a natural disaster such as a hurricane.

“If a hurricane happens, and we want to attract people back into the community, we have to have schools for people to come to,” Von Harten said. “The county has a wider range of things it would be responsible for under that kind of situation, but the schools are a critical piece of it. Anything that keeps taking the fund balance down is not good at all.”